I like using the automatic lists in soundcloud to discover new music. Often its hit or miss but it can surface some great tracks... Its intentional though, gotta have your finger on the skip track and heart...
I like using the automatic lists in soundcloud to discover new music. Often its hit or miss but it can surface some great tracks... Its intentional though, gotta have your finger on the skip track and heart...
Right but a good DJ introduces you to new music while fitting the track into the set as a whole. It’s not a random music discovery process, and oftentimes I’ll end up mostly preferring to listen to a song as a part of the set, not individually.
To use the food analogy again: sure, if you just eat random things on the menu, you might find new foods that you enjoy. But it’ll be a much better experience if the chef / restaurant is introducing you to new foods in an intelligent way, not randomly or “We see you like chicken, so try this other chicken dish.”
no idea how spotify ai specifically works (i don't use that service) but:
> fitting the track into the set as a whole. It’s not a random music discovery process
there have been plenty of attempts to analyze music and to automate track matching like the music genome (going back to '99) and while human DJ's definitely have their place (i actually listen to lots of those) it's not inconceivable that a lot of modern music could also be mixed and matched automatically with at least half-decent (to a human) results.
P.S. found the article itself pretty funny - like a nerdy, methodical complaint, just funny to read
Check out Paul Lamere's talk about playlisting that he presented at ISMIR 2010 (The International Society for Music Information Retrieval has conferences about all this stuff, and Paul founded The Echo Nest, which Spotify later bought):
ISMIR: The International Society for Music Information Retrieval
https://ismir.net/
Finding a path through the Jukebox: The Playlist Tutorial:
https://musicmachinery.com/2010/08/06/finding-a-path-through...
>Tutorial 4: Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist Tutorial. The simple playlist, in its many forms -- from the radio show, to the album, to the mixtape has long been a part of how people discover, listen to and share music. As the world of online music grows, the playlist is once again becoming a central tool to help listeners successfully experience music. Further, the playlist is increasingly a vehicle for recommendation and discovery of new or unknown music. More and more, commercial music services such as Pandora, Last.fm, iTunes and Spotify rely on the playlist to improve the listening experience. In this tutorial we look at the state of the art in playlisting. We present a brief history of the playlist, provide an overview of the different types of playlists and take an in-depth look at the state-of-the-art in automatic playlist generation including commercial and academic systems. We explore methods of evaluating playlists and ways that MIR techniques can be used to improve playlists. Our tutorial concludes with a discussion of what the future may hold for playlists and playlist generation/construction.
The Echo Nest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest
Paul's blog:
https://musicmachinery.com/
And github repo:
https://github.com/plamere
I don’t think it’s impossible or anything, I just don’t think it would really result in anything particularly interesting. The best DJs often add such an obscure reference or song, dialogue from a movie, etc. that comes from their own individuality. Music recommendation systems seem to mostly operate on a tagging/descriptive basis, because obviously they don’t have real lives to draw these references from.
If an AI would make interesting DJ mixes that aren’t merely collections of similar music, I think they’d need to be constructed in a totally different way.
Using recommendation engines feels like wading through the sewers. Eventually you find some gems but you have to pass a lot of shit on the way. Listening to actual DJ sets is gem after gem. Only problem is if you are looking for stuff to dj with yourself, most of what they are playing is yet unreleased or private edits that never come out.
But how do you find a good dj and then fight Spotify to listen to their set list?
I listen to them in full on Youtube and soundcloud.
I much prefer the human curated 'casts or mix shows from DJs with early releases from labels that do a mix while telling you the track/artist/release date. These are clearly aimed at human DJs rather than the larger public. But as far as new recommendations, they are far superior to "automatic" lists from any platform.